An elder is a pastor is a shepherd is an overseer is a teacher is a leader, and in many ways the unifying concept underlying the biblical material is that of guardian. Our job, as elders, is to protect the church from harm – from danger, dispersal, division, drift, deviant doctrine, disobedience, destruction and ultimately the devil – while we wait for the day when Jesus returns, conquers the accuser, and takes his rightful place as the Shepherd to end all shepherds. Until that day, we are called to be not just gatherers, growers and governors, but also guides, gospellers and guardians
Abraham Lincoln was fond of asking people: if we call a tail a leg, then how many legs does a dog have? “Five,” his audience would invariably answer. “No,” came his standard reply, “the correct answer is four. Calling something a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”
Lincoln could have been talking about eldership. If a person, or even an entire team, regards their role as entirely to do with vision-casting, strategic design and staff management – as opposed to pastoring (which is delegated to assistant/trainee/associate pastors), overseeing (which may be the purview of bishops, directors, apostles or superintendents) and theological protection (which is outsourced to writers of evangelical books, commentaries and articles) – then they may be managers, CEOs, even leaders, but they are not shepherds, no matter what label appears on their church website. Calling someone an elder doesn’t make them an elder.
That’s quite a sparky start, admittedly. But it is prompted by at least four, somewhat related, concerns.
The Challenge
Church Growth Pragmatism. The church growth pragmatists are always the bogeymen in these discussions, but often with good reason (and I say this as an attendee and even host of numerous leadership training courses, leadership coaching courses, Leadership Network learning communities, leadership conferences, and so on, almost all of which have been very helpful to me in a number of different ways). As I’m using the term here, a church growth pragmatist is someone for whom the key question, to which all others are subservient, is simply: “how do I get more people in my church?” It is often assumed that this is the same question as “how do we reach the most people in this community with the gospel?”, or even “how do we best fulfil the Great Commission?”, and to challenge this premise with the obvious objections is to risk being taken for a Luddite pedant fancypants anti-missional egghead theological nerd. (The obvious theoretical objection is that ten churches of 300 might well reach more people with the gospel than one church of 3000, and there are indeed some studies that suggest they tend to. The more practical objection is that only 6% of the people who join US megachurches were previously unchurched [Thumma, Travis & Bird, 2009], in contrast to 32% of people joining Protestant churches in general [Lifeway Research, 2009; note though that the methodology of the two studies is different, which makes the comparison inexact.] In other words: church growth and gospel growth are not the same thing. In many cases the former may even harm the latter.) But in the context of a discussion about eldership, this view is both highly significant and highly problematic. It begs the theological questions about what elders should be and do, and leaps straight to the practical question: how can a large organisation best be led? Whatever the answer is, that’s what “elders” are.
Multisite. Philosophers have been telling us for a while that we don’t so much think our way into new acting, but act our way into new thinking. Not many aspects of church life make this clearer than the recent acceptance of the multisite church model (which, full disclosure, we use at my church), and the way our praxis has rapidly rewired our theology of eldership. In many multisite models, it is almost unimaginable that the same person could publicly correct doctrine and privately comfort the dying. In some models, the idea that elders might actually know the people in their church, such that they could greet them, discipline them, counsel them about their work or their family, teach them, pray for them when they were sick or dying, and give an account to God for them, seems a quaint relic of a bygone age; those things are for site pastors or pastoral assistants, surely, not for the elders? He was never going to be a multisite fan, given his Presbyterian convictions, but I think Carl Trueman nails it here: “If your pastor doesn’t actually know you actually exist, he isn’t actually your pastor.” (I happen to think that the very concept of “one church, several congregations” is incoherent anyway, and that what we’re really talking about is “one eldership team, several churches”, but that’s for another day.)
Technology. The digital revolution has made both good and bad ideas spread much, much faster. In the first century, virtually the only way false doctrine entered the church was through somebody physically coming to town and teaching it. The invention of printing made it possible for church members to read things which were not sanctioned by their church leaders, and the circulation of tapes from the 1980s gave them access to sermons and preached materials from other pastors, but in the last fifteen years, for the first time in church history, ordinary church members have been able to hear far more theological content from people they have never met than from their elders. In a digital world, it can no longer be assumed that people will broadly believe what they are taught from the pulpit – numerous counterarguments to the elders’ position on X are immediately available at the click of a button – and this means that elders need to learn how to defend orthodox doctrine, and not merely assume it. Keller’s comments on this are worth hearing: “If pastors are not up to the job of distilling and understanding the writings of scholars in various disciplines, how will our laypeople do it? This is one of the things parishioners want from their pastors. We are to be a bridge between the world of scholarship and the world of the street and pew. I’m aware of what a burden this is. I don’t know that there has even been a culture in which the job of the pastor has been more challenging. Nevertheless, I believe this is our calling.”
Language. For a combination of missional and historic reasons, many churches are increasingly shying away from biblical terminology (elders, overseers, deacons, presbyters, pastors, bishops) and using generic categories with strong secular recognition (usually “leaders”).